Bugatti to Premiere Ultra-Exclusive New Supercar

Bugatti will unveil the Divo on August 24 during Monterey Car Week. This is the first look at it.
Illustration:
Bugatti photo

By

Jim Motavalli

July 16, 2018 4:20 p.m. ET

If the $1.5 million, 1,000-plus horsepower Bugatti Veyron 16.4 wasn’t enough supercar for you, the company is working on it. The new Divo, priced at $5.84 million (plus taxes) will hopefully “thrill people throughout the world,” said Stephan Winkelmann, president of Bugatti Automobiles.

To keep it exclusive, Bugatti will build only 40 Divos. The car will premiere Aug. 24 at “The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering,” which showcases vintage and newer competition cars and motorcycles, as part of Monterey Car Week.

Racing will be in the new car’s DNA. Its namesake is Albert Divo, who twice won the Targa Florio road race in Sicily for Bugatti in the late 1920s. Divo was with Bugatti until 1936, when he joined his friend Louis Chiron at Talbot. Chiron had also been a Bugatti driver, and he got one of the company’s new cars named after him, too.

Details of what will make the Divo thrilling are thin (as are photographs), though the company said it will be launching a new design language and reviving the tradition of coachwork styled “in house” instead of by an outside firm. The car will be “light and nimble, and will boast enormous downforce and g-forces,” Bugatti said.

According to Winkelmann, “Happiness is not around the corner. It is the corner. The Divo is made for corners.”

In company with other premium carmakers, VW-owned Bugatti is discovering that there’s gold in exclusive models. The $3 million Chiron—offered in an edition of 500—is selling well, and that led to a lightened Chiron Sport.

The extroverted Veyron is probably the best-known modern Bugatti in the U.S. Owners have included Tom Cruise, Jay-Z, and Tom Brady. The Veyron set a benchmark for performance when launched in 2005, with the SS version winning acclaim as the fastest production car in the world, capable of more than 250 mph.

The last variants went out of production in 2015. The Chiron was first shown in 2016, and is powered by an updated version of the Veyron’s eight-liter quad-turbocharged W16 engine. The Sport, which arrived this year, is a lightened version of the car.

According to Rebecca Lindblad, an executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book, the customers for these limited-edition vehicles are “mostly men—there are very few women—and they tend to be hand-picked by the companies. When the new models come out, they get the calls first. These buyers tend to be self-made, entrepreneurs, and risk takers, and they all know each other.”

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